Startups

The most logical thing to do when you decide to step back from your successful startup, which didn’t end up in the deadpool like the other 99 percent, is to take some time off. Appreciate things. Enjoy the fact that years of work paid off, literally. Watch your kids grow up, get an expensive hobby,

Not every startup journey starts as sweetly as the road co-founders Ishita Prasad and Maya Balakrishnan took to launching their new company, Polymer — but then again, not every startup takes its inspiration from a chocolate factory. Spun out from the wildly successful (and wildly expensive) bean-to-bar San Francisco chocolate factory Dandelion Chocolate, Polymer quietly raised

The ties that bind the tech industry and Hollywood continue to get tighter as the Creative Artists Agency launches a startup studio to develop new businesses with — and for — its roster of clients. Continuing a tradition that began with the incubation and launch of Funny or Die (alongside Sequoia Capital and Will Ferrell’s

If you want to pick up a new language, there’s no shortage of options, and free ones, at that. But one aspect of the process that has been neglected is pronunciation, which is an especially important part of it for professionals. Online, learning pronunciation is generally “hear a recording, then repeat it (to an empty

Because it’s rude to leave out children, HelloFresh co-founder Dan Treiman has teamed up with Joanna and David Parker to launch a healthy prepared meal service for the little ones. Treiman, who joined the company last December, helped Yumble officially launch this past summer. Yumble is currently live in 26 states on the east coast

Current announced today it has raised $5 million in Series A funding for its debit card aimed at kids that parents can control with an app. The company first introduced its Visa debit to the market in May. Kids can use the card to shop in stores or online using funds from their own bank

Jason Rowley is a venture capital and technology reporter for Crunchbase News. More posts by this contributor: “Peak startup” is a phrase that no doubt strikes terror in the hearts of entrepreneurs and startup investors alike. But saying “peak startup” is not the same as saying that the market is at the very height of

DoorDash CFO Mike Dinsdale has left the company less than a year after he joined, TechCrunch has learned. The food ordering and delivery startup is actively looking for a replacement. Dinsdale, who joined DoorDash last October, has been gone from the company for about four months. He is now gearing up to join Gusto, formerly known

Coding schools and bootcamps were booming a few years ago. But many of them only offered entry-level education, and quite a few of them are now shutting down. From the beginning, Holberton always aimed to stay above this fray by branding itself less as a bootcamp and more as an alternative to a four-year college degree.

Hopper, a top-ranked travel app that helps you figure out the best time to fly to save money, is today expanding its price prediction service to hotels. The company claims its price tracking technology is able to save users $34 per night, on average, when booking a hotel room through its service, or up to

Sex education startup O.school recently raised $800,000 to help achieve its goal of offering up easy access to sex-positive, inclusive and comprehensive education around sex and sexuality. Current investors include Cyan Banister of Founders Fund, X Factor Ventures and The House Fund. Sex is one of those things that is still heavily stigmatized in many societies.

Most young adults don’t have credit cards these days. Many of them are concerned about accruing debt. Others are finding it difficult to build credit. A handful of startups are now focused on building alternatives. One of these is Deserve, which recently changed its name from SelfScore. The Menlo Park-based startup had been working with international students to assess

James Comey, the former FBI director who was abruptly fired in May, has seemingly revealed himself as Twitter user Reinhold Niebuhr. In March, the account tweeted out the famous Anchorman meme — “Actually, I’m not even mad. That’s amazing! — alongside a link to the FBI’s jobs website. But how did anyone know to look

French startup iAdvize raised another $37.6 million (€32 million) from Idinvest, Bpifrance and Quadrille Capital. The company wants to convert casual website visitors into clients. Thanks to iAdvize, companies can track what you’re doing and engage with you to convince you that you should open a bank account, buy a coat or upgrade your subscription.

Shift Technology is raising a Series B round of $28 million from Accel and General Catalyst. Accel had already led the company’s previous round. Existing investors Elaia Partners and Iris Capital are also participating in today’s round. And it seems like the startup has grown quite a lot since my last article. Shift Technology has

Affirm is rolling out an app to make it easier to pay for large purchases in monthly payments. The concept has been in beta testing and it is now being made available widely. The company was started by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin. He believes that his business promotes better fiscal responsibility than traditional credit cards.

The large number of new venture capital funds may hint at broader structural changes in the startup ecosystem, but for the young and eager partners at the helm of many of these funds, all the rush of money means is more competition. Ian Rountree, the twenty something captain at the helm of Cantos Ventures, an

Stadium Goods, the online (and brick and mortar) marketplace for highly sought after sneakers and streetwear, is launching its first app. Live today to coincide with the startup’s two year anniversary, the first iteration of the app is basically just a mobile marketplace. But Stadium Goods plans to eventually build out this functionality and take

Jason Baptiste wants you to run. He said he’s seen the personal benefits of running since 2009, when he became unhappy with his weight and committed to run a “daily 5k,” something he’s held to ever since. “Not only has running helped me be healthier, it’s helped my mind and spirit become stronger,” Baptiste wrote.

Stitch Fix has filed to go public, finally revealing the financial guts of the startup which will be a test of modern e-commerce businesses that are looking to hit the market — and the numbers look pretty great! Let’s start off really quick with profits: aside from the last two quarters, Stitch Fix posted a

Intel Capital, the investment arm of the processor giant, is today announcing its latest tranche of investments, a total of nearly $60 million going in to 15 startups that are working on solving different problems in the bigger area of big data (with a full rundown below). The investments come on the back of a

Bubbleproof is a new mockumentary series following the misadventures of Reputation.com founder Michael Fertik and venture capitalist David Cowan as they launch a new fund. But I’m getting ahead of myself. In this first episode, Fertik (who co-wrote the series with Cowan and director Martin Sweeney) is dealing with newfound celebrity as the visionary behind “femto

PayKey’s team Banks face an increasingly crowded battlefield in the fight for millennial customers. Not only do they have to compete with services like Venmo, but many messaging apps are adding their own peer-to-peer payment services. Tel Aviv-based startup PayKey thinks it has the solution with a smartphone keyboard that lets bank customers access financial

In what could amount to a sea change in the way we transmit data over fiber optics, researchers at University College London have found a new way speed things up by changing the color of the transmitted light. “To maximise the capacity of optical fibre links, data is transmitted using different wavelengths, or colours, of

The furniture rental industry is stuck in the last. Current options involve old-school companies like CORT where most of the inventory will make your apartment look like a dorm room, or a place like Rent-A-Center where you’ll almost certainly pay many times what the item is actually worth. Enter Feather, a company trying to breathe

Jinn, the London-based startup that offers a same-hour ‘shop on your behalf’ delivery app that operates quite similarly to Postmates in the U.S., has shut down, with the company in the process of going into administration. TechCrunch understands that the remaining fifteen or so people still working in Jinn’s London office were let go on

MongoDB has finished up what is essentially the final step in going public, pricing its IPO at $24 and raising $192 million in the process. The company will debut on the public markets tomorrow and will once again test the waters for companies that are looking to build full-fledged businesses on the back of open-sourced

Atlas Informatics, whose Atlas Recall promised an intuitive and powerful way to index all your information across many services, is shutting down less than a year after launch. There will be no long sunset period: all user data will be deleted next Friday, the 27th. I wrote about the Seattle-based company last November; the idea

AdHawk is announcing that it has acquired one of its competitors, Y Combinator-backed Automate Ads. Even if you weren’t a customer, Automate Ads may sound familiar because it was previously known as Kuhcoon, a social advertising startup co-founded by Andrew Torba, who has since been in the news for getting banned from the YC alumni

A cyber security accelerator with links to the UK’s GCHQ intelligence agency is doubling down for a second program that’s larger and longer than the inaugural bootcamp which kicked off in January. The second cohort, announced today, will go through a nine month program vs three. There’s also more of them: Nine startups vs seven.